Using a Perl regex to print multi-line patterns from an HTML file
Question
I have an HTML file. Here is a sample
<div class="criteria" style="padding-left:0;font-style:italic"> You searched for:
<span title="A*" >Individual: <span><b>A*</b></span></span>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%">
<tr class="ListItemColorNew">
<td style="width:50%">
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<span class="LargeText15">JAMES BOND A'MONEYPENNY </span> (LIC# 1111111)
<div class="GrayTextShade"><i>Alternate Names: BOND JAMES</i></div>
<div class="GrayTextShade">
GREY TIDE LLC (LIC# 2222)
</div>
</div>
</td>
<td style="width:50%">
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<span class="LargeText15">FRANK WHITE A'SMALLS </span> (LIC# 1111111)
<div class="GrayTextShade"><i>Alternate Names: JAMES SMALLS</i></div>
<div class="GrayTextShade">
WEST RIVER CORP LLC (LIC# 3333)
</div>
</div>
</td>
<td style="width: 25%; vertical-align: top">
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<div><img alt="help" src=\'/Content/images/BrokerCheck/icon-blueCheck.png\' style=\'vertical-align:top;padding-right:5px\' />Broker</div>
</div>
</td>
<td style="width:25%;text-align:right;vertical-align:top">
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<a class="btn btn-primary" href="/Individual/Summary/5820616">Details »</a> </div>
</td>
</tr>
I'm trying to extract everything between <td style="width:50%"> and </td> . The data is stored in a file testFile.txt .
This is the Perl code I used
system("perl -pi.bak -e '/^<td style=\"width:50%\">.+<\\/td>/mg' testFile.txt";
4 answers
solution1
1 ACCPTED 2014-09-07 16:52:13
Your below code isn't actually doing anything:
system("perl -pi.bak -e '/^<td style=\"width:50%\">.+<\\/td>/mg' testFile.txt");
You're matching
m//in a void context with no captures, so the executed statement is meaningless.Your pattern will never match your content because:
a. You're using the any character
., but it won't match newlines unless you use the/sModifier .b. You're using
-pfor line by line processing of the file, but your pattern would need to span lines in order to match.
The following demonstrates both a regex solution (not recommended) and using an actual HTML Parser, in this case Mojo::DOM . For a helpful 8 minute introductory video, check out Mojocast Episode 5
use strict;
use warnings;
use Mojo::DOM;
my $data = do { local $/; <DATA> };
# Regex Solution:
if ( $data =~ m{<td style="width:50%">(.*?)</td>}s ) {
print "Regex Solution:\n$1";
} else {
warn "No pattern match found";
}
# Parser Solution:
my $dom = Mojo::DOM->new($data);
my $yourtd = $dom->at(q{td[style="width:50%"]})->content;
print "\nMojo::DOM:\n", $yourtd;
__DATA__
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World</title>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr>
</td>
<div class="criteria" style="padding-left:0;font-style:italic"> You searched for:
<span title="A*" >Individual: <span><b>A*</b></span></span>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%">
<tr class="ListItemColorNew">
<td style="width:50%">
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<span class="LargeText15">JAMES BOND A'MONEYPENNY </span> (LIC# 1111111)
<div class="GrayTextShade"><i>Alternate Names: BOND JAMES</i></div>
<div class="GrayTextShade">
GREY TIDE LLC (LIC# 2222)
</div>
</div>
</td>
<td style="width: 25%; vertical-align: top">
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<div><img alt="help" src=\'/Content/images/BrokerCheck/icon-blueCheck.png\' style=\'vertical-align:top;padding-right:5px\' />Broker</div>
</div>
</td>
<td style="width:25%;text-align:right;vertical-align:top">
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<a class="btn btn-primary" href="/Individual/Summary/5820616">Details »</a> </div>
</td>
</tr>
<table>
</body>
</html>
Outputs:
Regex Solution:
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<span class="LargeText15">JAMES BOND A'MONEYPENNY </span> (LIC# 1111111)
<div class="GrayTextShade"><i>Alternate Names: BOND JAMES</i></div>
<div class="GrayTextShade">
GREY TIDE LLC (LIC# 2222)
</div>
</div>
Mojo::DOM:
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<span class="LargeText15">JAMES BOND A'MONEYPENNY </span> (LIC# 1111111)
<div class="GrayTextShade"><i>Alternate Names: BOND JAMES</i></div>
<div class="GrayTextShade">
GREY TIDE LLC (LIC# 2222)
</div>
</div>
solution2
0 2014-09-07 15:18:47
.*?(<td style="width:50%">((?!<\/td>).)*?<\/td>)
See demo.Use gs flags.
See demo.
solution3
0 2014-09-07 15:25:48
As said in the comments, remove the ^ in your regexp.
Also, use /s instead of /mg if you want to treat the file content as a single line string which allows '.' pattern to allow match new line characters '\\n'.
/<td style=\"width:50%\">.+?<\\/td>/s
.+? while stop the matching at the first occurrence of </td> , not the last
solution4
0 2014-09-07 21:44:04
I hope you've seen previous advice to avoid regexes to process HTML? It's really true! The only excuse I can think of for avoiding one of the several excellent HTML modules is that your data is so malformed that nothing else will process it.
Your "sample" of your HTML file is particularly unhelpful. Before I fixed the indentation the lines were scattered all over the place. After I looked at it I saw that it was the end of one table element followed by the start of another, so it left several elements unbalanced and either closed but not opened or vice-versa. Please don't do that to us.
I built a well-formed HTML file that contains your extract, and this is a program that will process it that uses HTML::TreeBuilder
use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;
my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_file('html.html');
my @td50 = $tree->look_down(_tag => 'td', style => 'width:50%');
print $_->as_HTML('<>&', ' '), "\n\n" for @td50;
output
<td style="width:50%">
<div class="gvListItemStyle"><span class="LargeText15">JAMES BOND A'MONEYPENNY </span> (LIC# 1111111) <div class="GrayTextShade"><i>Alternate Names: BOND JAMES</i></div>
<div class="GrayTextShade"> GREY TIDE LLC (LIC# 2222) </div>
</div>
</td>
In case you or others need it, here's the HTML input document that I used
<html>
<body>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<div class="criteria" style="padding-left:0;font-style:italic"> You searched for:
<span title="A*" >Individual: <span><b>A*</b></span></span>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%">
<tr class="ListItemColorNew">
<td style="width:50%">
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<span class="LargeText15">JAMES BOND A'MONEYPENNY </span> (LIC# 1111111)
<div class="GrayTextShade"><i>Alternate Names: BOND JAMES</i></div>
<div class="GrayTextShade">
GREY TIDE LLC (LIC# 2222)
</div>
</div>
</td>
<td style="width: 25%; vertical-align: top">
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<div><img alt="help" src=\'/Content/images/BrokerCheck/icon-blueCheck.png\' style=\'vertical-align:top;padding-right:5px\' />Broker</div>
</div>
</td>
<td style="width:25%;text-align:right;vertical-align:top">
<div class="gvListItemStyle">
<a class="btn btn-primary" href="/Individual/Summary/5820616">Details »</a> </div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
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